Dystopia Rising is an amazing LARP, setting, and most of all, community. Here at DR:GA our goal is to focus on the breath of content that we have available to us and the areas that we feel confident telling stories and exploring the world. We are not experts on everything, so this is where you come in:

We need your feedback and we need it directly sent to us through email so we can’t lose it. Our email is DystopiaRisingGeorgia@Gmail.com and one of the tenants of our business at DR:GA is customer service and timely responses.

It was brought to our attention that in our attempt to represent the large veteran population of Georgia in our setting, we overlooked some aspects that we were 1) unaware of and 2) assumed were common sense. Assumptions are were everyone gets in trouble and while we felt that we safeguarded ourselves with requiring background approval, we identified that we can go one further.

We have updated our policy page to include the following:

Use of Modern Military Dress Uniforms, Honors, Insignia, and Flags. As a community with many veterans of the armed forces we recognize that these items have significant meaning. Use of modern military dress uniforms, medals, insignia, or flags is not permitted for costuming, setting or prop purposes. We define a flag in this context as anything modern or historically recognizable, a symbol or banner whose original intent was to be displayed on a flag pole or guidon. Paraphernalia related to the US Flag (clothing with stars and stripes, etc.) is permissible.

We have also confirmed that the wording on Natural One’s met our intended emphasis on them being descendants of survivalists:

"As the descendants of survivalist preparedness communities, such folks were armed and ready to disappear into the woods and wilds when the apocalypse came..."

Reviewing the Genjian write-up, which does fully require costuming and background approval by our team, we’ve removed the following:

Example Costuming:

Military Dress Uniforms

We absolutely overlooked an aspect of our new guideline and removed it. In the coming weeks, we will be asking for you, our players, to present your concepts for inclusion in our game and ease of use for players to dress as them appropriately without violating our new policy.

Further, we’ve added the following to our Ingredients List:

Simulated firearms/munitions and other loud sounds (players will be given notice beforehand).

At Opening Announcements at the latest, we will declare any use of simulated gunshot/explosive noises or anything that could be interpreted in that capacity and preceding the sound with an audio warning beforehand. We will further clarify this as we confirm our tools available to guarantee your comfort.

We would like to specifically thank Justin Allen for the comment that started this conversation and Krista Sides, Director of DR:AR as both a Veteran and fellow Director for working with us on the exact wording the emphasized our intent and where we can improve.

We encourage all Veterans in the Dystopia Rising to consider joining the Veterans group:

We also would like to further encourage diversity on our marshaling team so that we can be aware of gaps in our knowledge and understanding in the future to help where we can. With that in mind, if you are a woman, person of color, minority, nonbinary, LGBTQA+, etc, we encourage you to apply to join our team here:

We are really looking forward to bringing an amazing Dystopia Rising experience to Georgia that our players can enjoy. Our community is important to us, and we hope that these changes help to make our game a place more welcoming to everyone interested in joining us on a post-apocalypse adventure.